Artificial reality - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 93

A true three-dimensional volume cartogram of population spacetime is dif-
ficult to imagine. 21 Such an image would have to be based upon the axiom of
giving each human life equal representation rather than each area. As lives have
temporal extent they would have to be drawn as life lines. It is hard to imagine
what further constraints would be employed in constructing such spaces. Obvi-
ously volume should be in proportion to individual lives and contiguous places
in space should touch each other, as should places connected with themselves,
both forwards and backwards in time.
If we then choose to minimise the area of internal boundaries, which in a
three-dimensional spacetime cartogram are planes rather than lines, we will warp
time into space and vice versa. 22 A place that many people left will slip back in
time, while a place growing in population pushes forward. What are we creating
and how can we understand it - let alone view it?
The computer algorithm employed here could be adapted to create all the
variants mentioned above. The problem is not creating them; it is understanding
why it would be useful to do so and how to use the transformed manifolds made.
The nature, creation and use of spaces above two dimensions form the subject
of the last part of this topic. Here, next, concentration is applied to how the
unusual, but understandable, two-dimensional population spaces can be gainfully
employed in the visualization of spatial social structure.
21 Two-dimensional cartograms of death are hard enough to envisage, let alone three-dimensional
ones of birth, life and death: 'Turning to the map of the world, how far from London can you extend
your military power before you will lose one hundred thousand men? This “circle” obviously moves
much farther over sea than into Europe where military resistance, say from the French, would make
such a move very expensive per geographic mile. A map of the earth with hundred-thousand-man-
lost circles centred on England in 1850 establishes the most distant place, not as New Zealand, but
somewhere around Moscow. The paths of least deaths at right angles to the circles draw another
set of real longitudes and latitudes. Moscow is antipode, the opposite side of the earth, the “down
under” from London. To conquer the world is to conquer Moscow, not Auckland, and this is why
the British kept moving toward Moscow from the Crimea, the walls of Peking, the Khyber Pass,
from Vladivostok. All “paths” from London lead to Moscow, and thus the mysticism of Mackinder's
geopolitic is explained' (Bunge, 1973, p. 286).
22 'In the opinion of this author, the value of such maps can be great for geographers and other
behavioural scientists - a value which seems limited only by the imagination of the scholars whose
tools they should be' (Lewis, 1969, p. 406). Section 9.3 of this topic explores these ideas further.